'''Please post any ideas you have about OpenWetWare software development here.'''

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Feel free to add further ideas for future implementation or discussion

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== Features and priorities ==

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==Blogs==

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This is the list of prioritized features that came out of the [[OpenWetWare_steering_committee/Software_development_meeting_3-8-06| 3-8-06 meeting]]. They're listed in the order in which George is going to be working on them. Also included are the folks George needs to talk to in order to nail down exactly how the feature is going to work.

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===Plugins===

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* '''Related Articles''' - A wordpress plugin that could display a certain number of articles related to the topic of the post itself. This could be achieved through proper usage of tags in the blogging software and would allow the plugin to search OWW for related articles based on the tags. This plugin could be used internally on OWW blogs but also on any blog, thus providing great outreach if used on a fair number of top blogs.

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=== Priority 1 ===

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* '''Inline Links''' - Similar the previous plugin, it could be of great interest to have certain keywords in a text automagically become links to relevant articles. Such plugins are used for advertisement in blogs where keywords in the blog post become links to sites related to them. This feature would add a wiki-feel to the blog if implemented seamlessly

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* Bulk image upload (Austin)

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* Better support for "scientific" markup ie formulae etc (?)

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* Easier user account creation (Sri, Jason)

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* Ability to make categories invisible (?)

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* "Cite this page" support (?)

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* Improvements to current support for turning wiki pages into static pages (Austin)

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=== Priority 2 ===

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* User-defined sidebar

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=== Priority 3 ===

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* More data conversion tools

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* Semantic Mediawiki integration

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* Support for tagging

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==Tags==

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*Using '''"tags"''' (similar to sites such as delicious or flikr) so end-users could help categorize protocols with minimal effort. This idea was suggested by Ishan.

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===Proposed implementation===

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In thinking about this issue some more, I think Austin might be right. We may want to initially try to use Categories as '''tags''' and see how that works. It seems like the easiest thing to do as it requires no new functionality in MediaWiki. It seems that the easiest way to enforce this is to only have a single layer of categories and no subcategories. We could also avoid tags like ''E. coli protocol.'' For example, the page [[Electrocompetent cells | Preparing electrocompetent cells]] would get tagged with <font face="courier">Category:Escherichia coli</font> and <font face="courier">Category:Protocol</font> so that it would fall under both categories. This would enable users to collect together pages in different groupings. Someone viewing the category <font face="courier">Escherichia coli</font> would see equipment pages, protocol pages, material pages, and information pages. I think for our purposes, this might be a more useful application of categories. This would also have the advantage that some pages whose categorization is ambiguous could be labelled with multiple tags. For example, [[Miniprep]] could be tagged with <font face="courier">Category:DNA</font> and <font face="courier">Category:Escherichia coli</font> and <font face="courier">Category:Protocol</font>.

Later, if this scheme proves useful and maintainable, we could consider trying to customizing the mediawiki software further by renaming '''Categories''' to '''Tags'''.

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Such an approach may also help the generation of tailored [[Special:Recentchanges]] pages.

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--[[User:Rshetty|RS]]

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I really like this idea, though I am concerned about the implementation and usefulness to the user. Just for clarification I'm going to call what you've descibed above "categories" and make a distinction between that and "tags." In tagging a user has a set of labels that are specific to them, so they can create a categorization scheme that is most useful to them personally. For instance, I may want to tag only the e.coli protocols I actualy use as "E.Coli" and then I can click on that tag and bring up my personal list of favorite e.coli protocols. just to be clear, this is different from categorizing in that I only bring up things I have labeled, not every protocol categorized as "E.Coli". The reason I like this better is that I think it will be more useful to the user, and as a result, the user will be more inclined to bother categorizing things (in other words, I think it scales better).

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OK, so tags ''may'' be more useful to the user, but what about generating protocol pages for the larger community to browse through? Its clear how the categories scheme allows dynamic generation of protocols pages, i.e. if Category = E.Coli and Category = Protocol then include a link in the E.coli protocols page. Well, tags enable something similar (and perhaps better), they can aggregate all the tags associated with a page and look at the most popular tag and assign the page under that label on the main protocols page. Or more complicated things like creating heirarchical categories simply by clustering the tags on pages, see [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/biology/clusters/ Flikr's biology clusters] as an example. The big downside to using tags in my opinion is that it will require some serious changes to the software to implement them in a way that is convenient for the user.

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--[[Jason Kelly|JK]]

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Also, it's worth noting that since each article has its own URL, we could do this in the framework of existing tagging sites such as [http://del.icio.us/ del.icio.us] -- could at least be a way to easily explore if this whole thing is useful anyway.

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There has been a some [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us-style_Tags_for_MediaWiki discussion] about implementing tags for wikipedia, so maybe we could get some development help?

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:I like the tag idea a lot but until we find a nice way of implementing it within OWW, I think the usefulness of categories merits implementing them.--[[User:Bcanton|BC]] 17:49, 22 February 2006 (EST)

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Semantic MediaWiki extension seems to accomplish a lot of this:

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*[[Wikipedia:Semantic_MediaWiki|Semantic MediaWiki]]

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*[[Wikipedia:Semantic_Wiki|Semantic Wiki]]

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*[http://wiki.ontoworld.org/ Live demo 1] and [http://semanticwiki.jp/jabionpedia live demo 2]

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--[[User:Ilya|Ilya]] 13:31, 26 April 2006 (EDT)

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==User management==

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To do:

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*Reject and Approve boxes should be radio buttons - these are mutually exclusive actions. Approve should be selected by default. --[[User:Ilya|Ilya]] 14:04, 26 April 2006 (EDT)

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**Agreed. [[User:GeorgeA|George]] 14:21, 26 April 2006 (EDT)

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*E-mail dropdown box should be logically connected to Reject and Approve actions (we don't want to send a reject email to someone we gave account to and vice versa), or eliminated altogether - a simple button to edit email text should be enough. --[[User:Ilya|Ilya]] 14:04, 26 April 2006 (EDT)

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**Sri has mentioned having an option that allows you to edit an email as well as not to send one. I'll throw in some javascript to automatically select the template based on the decision but other options, like selecting a different template altogether, should still be available I think. [[User:GeorgeA|George]] 14:21, 26 April 2006 (EDT)

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==Other==

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*'''Discussion boards''' similar to [http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Forum.Forum these] found on the Fluwiki site. Actually, there are a number of cool things on the Fluwiki site that might be worth implementing:

**This would be very desirable. There are some posts on the mediawiki message boards saying that this is on the list of things to do so maybe this could be done in collaboration with the mediawiki community?

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*Tailored [[Special:Recentchanges]] viewing so that you could look at all the recent changes associated with a particular namespace like [[BE.109]] or [[Synthetic Biology]] or the [[Mimulus Community]]. It helps new users track those changes that they care about more easily.

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Current revision

Feel free to add further ideas for future implementation or discussion

Blogs

Plugins

Related Articles - A wordpress plugin that could display a certain number of articles related to the topic of the post itself. This could be achieved through proper usage of tags in the blogging software and would allow the plugin to search OWW for related articles based on the tags. This plugin could be used internally on OWW blogs but also on any blog, thus providing great outreach if used on a fair number of top blogs.

Inline Links - Similar the previous plugin, it could be of great interest to have certain keywords in a text automagically become links to relevant articles. Such plugins are used for advertisement in blogs where keywords in the blog post become links to sites related to them. This feature would add a wiki-feel to the blog if implemented seamlessly